Sunday, February 12, 2012


Relatively small, but an interesting (new?) industry for Anonymous to hack.
Brazzers pornography site forum broken into, hacker says more than 350,000 users’ data compromised
February 11, 2012 by admin
Ralph Satter of Associated Press reports a 17 year-old Moroccan who claims allegiance to Anonymous acquired personal information on 350,000 users of a popular pornography site by hacking into an older un-updated forum:
A small sample of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of user data allegedly compromised were posted to the Internet earlier this week. Emails, usernames, and encrypted passwords were divulged, and in some cases it was possible to infer porn users’ full names and country of origin.
Read more on SeattlePI. Hacked Brazzers’ accounts have been a frequent occurrence/posting on sites such as Pastebin, but this appears to be the most massive data acquisition, if true.
[From the article:
The breach is a potential embarrassment for Luxembourg-based Manwin, which runs some of the world's best-known pornography websites. [How can it be that I've never heard of them? Bob]


For my Ethical Hackers....
"Details of the tools, techniques and procedures used by the hackers behind the RSA security breach have been revealed in a research paper (PDF) published by Australian IT security company Command Five. The paper also, for the first time, explains links between the RSA hack and other major targeted attacks. This paper is a vendor-neutral must-read for any network defenders concerned by the hype surrounding 'Advanced Persistent Threats.'"


A short (free) eBook worth reading.
February 11, 2012
How Search Engines Work - book chapter by publisher of Search Engine Watch
How Search Engines Work, by Mike Grehan: "This year (2012) it will be ten years since I wrote the second edition of a book about search engines called Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide. I decided to revisit it recently. Writing it was very difficult because there was nowhere near the amount of information available about the inner workings of search engines and information retrieval on the web back in the day. So once I finished it, I breathed a sigh of relief and have very rarely ventured back into its pages. Even now, I frequently meet people at conferences who bought it and still regard it as a useful resource. And surprisingly for me, having just re-read the most important parts of it, I also find a lot of it to be as relevant and fresh now as it was a decade ago."


Is this correct? Is AT&T likely to become a real estate trust?
"Daniel Berniger writes that one of the unexpected consequences of AT&T's transition to HD voice and all-IP networks is that the footprint of required network equipment will shrink by as much as 90 percent, translating into a $100 billion windfall as the global telecom giant starts emptying buildings and selling off the resulting real estate surplus. Since IP connections utilize logical address assignments, a single fiber can support an almost arbitrary number of end-user connections — so half a rack of VoIP network equipment replaces a room full of Class 4 and Class 5 circuit switching equipment, and equipment sheds replace the contents of entire buildings. AT&T's portfolio goes back more than 100 years, even as commercial real estate appreciated five fold since the 1970s, so growth of telephone service during the 20th century leaves the company with 250 million sq ft of floor space real estate in prime locations across America. 'The scale of the real estate divestiture challenge may justify creating a separate business unit to deal with the all-IP network transition,' writes Berniger, who adds that ATT isn't the only one who will benefit. 'The transition to all-IP networks allows carriers to sell-off a vast majority of the 100,000 or so central offices (PDF) currently occupying prime real estate around the globe.'"


Rather hard to read (black on brown) and I not too sure the numbers are realistic either...
iPads Vs Textbooks: We Crunch the Numbers (Infographic)
On Jan 19th, Apple made a huge announcement: iBooks 2 would “reinvent” the way students learn by offering interactive textbooks, and iBooks Author would make it easy for anyone, even without programming skills, to create those books.
These new iBook textbooks would not only offer things traditional textbooks cannot, like embedded video, audio, and interactive graphics, but they would also be much less expensive than textbooks are today—with an average price of around $15, as opposed to the current average $75 cost many students pay now.
But are iBooks really cheaper? Especially after you add in the cost of a $400 iPad. So the folks who help people become teachers at Online Teaching Degree decided to crunch a few of the numbers, and see if change is truly coming. The results may not be as revolutionary as you think…


Look at this and ask yourself if you couldn't do better...
Best Educational Wikis of 2011
With the announcement of the 2011 Edublog Award winners, there are now two more award-winning wikis in the Wikispaces community. And we couldn’t be prouder!
ICTmagic First place for the 2011 Best Educational Wiki
It’s a collection of IT resources for students and teachers, and it’s sure to give you more ideas than you could possibly have time to try.

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